TLDR; Yes, clojure is behind in regards of web development, but it is not as bad as you said. There is active work done in this area.
I totally agree with what you said. It is a general understanding in the clojure community that you compose libraries to get things done. However, for web development that still means a lot of repitition, thats why I created the closp template.
It is based on luminus (http://www.luminusweb.net/) which is a lighter "framework" with more options.
My idea was to provide one way with sensible defaults to get started in doing web stuff in clojure.
I still work regularly on it and would be happy about contributions / feature requests. Whereas regularly means in terms of months as I do this all in my spare time.
Also I am quite active in the clojure community and I know that luminus is not shunned, but instead it also receives improvements and releases regularly. Also the author of luminus works professionally with clojure and with luminus.
And I have to admit, that luminus has the far superior documentation, he has done a good job on it I think.
I think the fact that these things aren't magically is a big plus. You can use the defaults, but you can trivially customize the middleware stack for your specific needs.
Another thing to note is that a lot of the stuff that traditional frameworks do is geared towards doing presentation on the server. Modern apps tend to do presentation on the client, and the server primarily provides a set of stateless services for the client to fetch the data that it needs. With this approach, you don't really need a complex server framework in the first place.
(defn login [{{:keys [email password]} :params session :session}] ...)
Also remember as well as the :keys special form you have :strs and :syms.